Imperial walking stick

A walking stick for an emperor. Just a pity that the intended recipient has been dead for some 130 years... Oh well, that's life -- or, er, death -- for ya.

As another part of the culture/style history examination for which I made this portrait, we were to make an artifact that could have belonged to the historical character we'd chosen -- in my case Norton I, née Joshua A. Norton, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. Now, one of the few things found in Norton's boarding house room after his death was a collection of walking sticks, so I figured -- what if someone had made a walking cane especially for him? Perhaps a gift from some well-off person with a fondness for the Emperor, or an artisan who wanted the bragging right of having made some of the imperial regalia of America. And there were plenty of sailors in San Francisco, so there should have been people around with some skill in the fanciful shaping of bone and horn...

Anyway, this is what I came up with. I do wish I could have spent more time on getting everything right, but time has been quite scarce lately. Also, I hope to get some better photographs at some point -- the colours in these are quite borked; way too yellow -- but I figure it is better to post something now than to wait until I may have forgotten all about this thing...

~

Wood, sculpey and fimo, mostly. ~94 cm tall.